At any point in time, many millions of people may be using many millions of communications devices to access network resources to obtain information and/or entertainment services from locations all around the world. Most of the time, communications devices are able to successfully access desired network resources to obtain desired information and/or entertainment services without incident.
Sometimes, however, a communications device may be unable to access a desired network resource. There may be many different reasons why a communications device may not be able to access a desired network resource. For example, sometimes network problems may prevent a communications device from connecting to the desired network resource. Some network problems may be local to a particular user, while other network problems may affect many different users. Sometimes a problem associated with the actual desired network resource may prevent a communications device from connecting to the network resource. For example, the network resource may be “down” or otherwise non-operational (or at least less than fully operational) because of hardware, software, and/or local network problems affecting the network resource.
In situations where a particular communications device may be unable to access a desired network resource, the user of the communications device may change configuration settings on the communications device, restart the network connections, restart the communications device, or perform other steps in an attempt to make the communications device connect to the desired network resource. But in some situations, the reason or reasons why the user's communications device may be unable to access the desired network resource may be entirely beyond the user's control.
If a user knew when the reasons for a failed connection attempt were beyond the user's control, then the user might not waste time and effort trying to connect to the desired network resource after the first failed attempt. However, it may be very difficult if not impossible for the user to determine whether the problem or problems that may be preventing access to the desired network resource are beyond the user's control, in part because of the decentralized nature of the management and operations of network resources in the public Internet.